Jack Spencer: Beyond the Surface

Overview

With fall upon us, Jackson Fine Art is pleased to kick off the 2013 Atlanta Art season with two stellar solo exhibitions of contemporary photography by Southern natives: Jeannette Montgomery Barron, of Atlanta, and Jack Spencer, of Nashville.

Jack Spencer is renowned in the art world as well as the music and entertainment industry with his painterly photographs of people, places, and things that truly remark on the essence of the subject. Spencer’s new series, Mythologies, reveals the artist’s interest in the idiosyncrasy of perception, the vulnerability of life, and the unwavering importance of beauty. Starting simply with a request for a commissioned portrait, Jack, uninspired by what we know as typical portraiture, decided to experiment by painting and marking his subjects with vibrant patterns and colors as you may find reminiscent in famed fashion photographer Irvin Penn’s portraits of the indigenous people in Peru and New Guinea. With his use of paint, Jack takes the viewer far deeper than the surface by transforming his subject. Not intentionally but instinctively, Spencer uses the style of Edward Steichen’s Pictorialist photography with soft-focus and the gritty realism of Robert Frank to add to the ambiguity and mystery of his photography. While some may look to photography for its certainty, Spencer opts for the richness and reward of subjectivity. This mystery and ambiguity, combined with its tonal wealth, transports us into an undefined realm somewhere between fact and fiction.

Works

Press release

Artist

Jack Spencer

Jack Spencer was born in Mississippi and currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee. Jack is a self-taught photographer who attended Louisiana Tech University.

In Spencer's first body of work, Native Soil, he traveled across the southern U.S. Since then he has traveled the country and into Mexico, always allowing life to lead him to his next series. LSU Press published his book, Native Soil, in 1999 and University of Texas Press published his latest book This Land in 2017

His work is in many collections including: The Houston Museum of Fine Art, Berkley Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Ogden...